Benchmade 530 Folding Knife

www.benchmade.com
We’ll always love our multi-tools, but there’s something engagingly simple and graceful about a well-crafted knife.  The Benchmade 530 achieves our Platonic ideal of the flip-knife, with its spear-point blade made of 154cm stainless steel, an ambidextrous thumb-stud opener, horizontal “scales” along its svelte black handle, and reversible steel pocket clip. At a feathery 1.88 ounces, it’s one of the lightest, most trail-friendly knives on the market, with a 3.25-inch blade that’s long enough for all back- and sidecountry uses—cooking, light camp work, and the like, and Benchmade’s proprietary Axis locking mechanism will help prevent the slim chances of user error. For more rugged applications, you should upgrade to the 530S, which adds a serrated edge on the lower half of the blade for deeper cutting.  Either way, you’ll likely spend almost as much time using the knife as you will admiring its craftsmanship.  As one tester—who had used only a give-away utility knife until he found the 530—said simply, “This is a knife.”